The importance of a quality, reading protocol that is comfortable, repeatable, and accountable cannot be overstated. The Slides to the right share my three reading protocols. Occasionally, the most difficult texts require that I read them aloud to students. Sometimes, we listen to the "texts" first in the form of a speech. No matter the exact appearance in the classroom, an English class is built on reading. 

Close reading is sometimes frowned upon as a term that comes from the high-stakes testing, common-core implementation era of education. What it actually is, is an emphasis on the reading process over the irrelevant classroom product for which students are used to skimming. I have no problem teaching students the importance of the process of reading. As an avid and voracious reader, the collective total of all the humans I have ever met have taught me far less than the collective total of all the books I've ever read. 

While I cannot overstate the importance of reading and learning for learning's sake, in school, we just have to prove that we have acquired some knowledge. In my classroom, every text students are ever asked to read will connect on deep levels with all the other texts I've asked them to read. Their learning and connections will then be assessed as a final essay or project. I've found that using a consistent connection tool for each unit helps students to connect texts together to create a meaningful educational schema before being asked to write. In short, when the tool used to connect texts becomes easy to use, the cognitively challenging task of connecting learning becomes easy.